Auburn residents who need to get or renew their driver’s licenses will soon have to travel miles out of their way to offices in Kent, Puyallup or Federal Way.

That’s because sometime between March and May, the State Department of Licensing will close its drivers’ licensing office at 3310 Auburn Way N.

In all, the state expects to close 25 drivers’ licensing offices, among them those in the cities of Greenwood, Othello, Bothell, Morton and Forks. The closures represent an answer to Gov. Christine Gregoire’s call for belt tightening in light of the $6 billion state budget deficit.

Auburn officials, noting that wealthier cities such as Kirkland were spared, said they believe the state is picking on poorer communities.

“To me this rings again of the people who have the most need, who are on the poorest end of the financial outlook, are the ones who are going to get hurt the most again,” said a furious Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis. “We don’t have computers here like they do in Bellevue. Only 45 percent of the households here have one.

“… Once again, the city of Auburn with its poor population is left without the services it needs,” Lewis said.

Selena Davis, a spokesperson for the DOL, said residents in the affected communities will grow to like it.

“We expect wait times to go down,” said Davis. “Forty-three percent of all driving licenses granted don’t require an office visit. Once people get used to doing business a different way, they will appreciate the convenience.”

Whether Forks residents come to appreciate the convenience of the 47-mile trip to Port Angeles remains in question.

Davis said the closure of the Auburn office is expected to save $150,315 in the 2009-2011 biennium and more in subsequent years by reducing lease costs and building maintenance, equipment maintenance costs, armored car expenses, utility and janitorial expenses and travel and per diem expenses.

Davis said it also is important to encourage people to use alternative means like the Internet and telephone to obtain the needed services, bringing “technology into the 21st century.” She said the DOL has developed the following plans to improve service:

• Use technology such as self-service kiosks within the community to allow customers to renew their driver license or receive their driver record

• Improve wait times through better staffing at consolidated offices

• Extend service hours in the 10 largest offices until 7 p.m. weekdays and all day Saturday

• Accept credit cards in drivers’ service offices

• Enhance online services and look for new ways to deliver electronic services.

The closures will not affect vehicle licensing offices. Davis said the DOL has no plans to close or eliminate any of the licensing functions that county auditors or its subagent business partners now provide.

In a recent conference call, Lewis asked DOL Director Liz Luce if she had actually visited the Auburn site. Luce said she had visited each site, observing congestion and parking problems and the number of transactions per year. She said the Auburn office has become so crowded that on occasion people have to endure wait times of as much as an hour and a half.

“We are not going to get any more money for more offices, so we needed to figure a way to get people in and out of there faster,” Luce said. “So we started looking at those offices and looking at what sort of things people are coming in for and how do we help them to not come in. Two groups, seniors and young drivers, tend to use the offices most.

“We wanted to look at how we could reduce the wait times in our offices, and the only thing I could come up with was to take as much out of those offices and either put it on-line through the Internet, or by phone.”

The lease for the Auburn site is up in April, Luce said, and the state was unable to find another location closer than the Kent office at 25410 74th St. S.

Lewis wasn’t buying any of it. He said the city was able to find several leaseable sites in Auburn within hours.

“We have a long history of this kind of thing happening,” Lewis said. “If the idea is to be more efficient, then put the services where they are absolutely needed and lessen those services in the more affluent areas where they can have other alternatives … The state knows exactly what this does to people who have a difficult time getting around anyway, who don’t understand good English, who are working two or three jobs. They know exactly what this means, but the lease was up. Big, stinking deal.”

Cindy Rapier, director of housing for the International Students Program at Green River Community College said the closure will hit the college’s 1,011 international students especially hard.

“This news completely blindsided us,” Rapier said. “We have all these incoming international students, and as a service we take them to the Department of Licensing as part of their orientation process and help them get their state identification. The reason we do that is that it’s necessary for them to have identification while they are here at school. It’s better than carrying a passport, which is very difficult to replace if lost. This quarter alone, 120 incoming international students needed to use the services of the DOL. It’s going to be a huge impact for us.”